Authorship and Contributorship

The Journal of Medical Sciences (JOMS) follows the authorship criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Every person listed as an author must meet all four of the following criteria:

  1. substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data;
  2. drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
  3. final approval of the version to be published;
  4. agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, ensuring that questions about its accuracy or integrity are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Contributors who do not meet all four criteria, such as those who provided only funding, general supervision, technical assistance, sample collection or language editing, are listed in the Acknowledgements with their permission.

Author contribution statement

Every manuscript must include an Author Contributions section using the CRediT taxonomy (for example: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision).

Corresponding author

The corresponding author communicates with the journal on behalf of all authors, confirms that all authors have approved the submission and the final version, and is the contact for queries after publication.

ORCID

The corresponding author must provide an ORCID iD. All other authors are strongly encouraged to provide one. ORCID iDs are displayed on the published article.

Changes to authorship

The author list, author order and affiliations should be final at submission. Any request to add, remove or reorder authors before publication must be made by the corresponding author and must include:

  • the reason for the change; and
  • a signed statement of agreement from every author, including any author being added or removed.

Changes to authorship after publication are made only through a formal correction, following the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Affiliations shown in the published article reflect the institutions where the work was carried out and are not changed after publication; a current address may be added as a note.

Authorship disputes

JOMS does not adjudicate authorship disputes. Where authors disagree, the journal will suspend processing of the manuscript and refer the matter to the authors' institution(s), in line with COPE guidance.